Liquid Web Announces Managed WooCommerce Hosting Beginner Plan

I love the fact about the successful teams that they maintain an incredible relationship with their customers. They provide great support, constantly listen to the feedback from their customers, get back to them, and evolve. These things let them actually analyze what the customers are looking for and what are they grey areas which need attention.

One such living story is of the awesome team behind Liquid Web. Earlier this year, they announced a new business paradigm in WordPress arena — Managed WooCommerce Hosting. If you take a close look at the eCommerce business, you will soon realize there was definitely space for such a solution. It takes care of all the technical details and provides you with powerful tools to focus on real content & grow. 💯

👉 However, a lot of people did not like the way they priced their solution. Because the basic plan was starting at $250 — which is definitely a big amount. But not for the store owners who were already in this business and had issues with their current hosts for even a bigger amount. A Managed WooCommerce Hosting solution with tools like Jilt, Glew, BeaverBuilder, Astra, and WordPressoptimization for eCommerce led by a team of experts was a perfect solution for them.

⁉️ The issue was for the people who were just starting off; $250 was a big amount. They simply couldn’t opt for it just because of the price. The team at the Liquid Web listened to their feedback and analyzed the data to see what they could do. And after a couple of months, they optimized their plans to offer a beginner plan starting at $39 only.

I am glad that they considered those people and worked out a plan for them. Today I am going to take a look at this plan in detail and see what they have to offer. For extensive details on all the features, check out WPCouple’s review of Liquid Web Managed WooCommerce Hosting. Let’s get started!

⚡️ Managed WooCommerce Hosting Beginner Plan by Liquid Web

Managed WooCommerce Hosting is probably one of the hot things in the WordPress community. It was introduced by Liquid Web at the start of this year and is definitely a huge success. I do not have any stats on this, but I am pretty sure they would have some incredible success stories to share.

After a couple of months, they are back with a new addition — Beginner Plan for Managed WordPress Hosting. Huge props to the minds behind the product, especially VP Products & Innovation Chris Lema and Partner Manager Lindsey Miller. Talking about this new plan, Chris Lema says:

We wanted every person who wanted to try their hand at WooCommerce to have an inexpensive option to see how fast it can really be. That’s why we created the Beginner Plan. While our standard plans are for existing stores that need not only speed but enhanced analytics and segmentation, our Beginner Plan is perfect for someone who has a store idea and wants to see if it will take off.

👉 I tend to agree with what Chris Lema has to say. It would be helpful for beginners in many ways. Due to the financial limitations, they were trying out some cheap options, which means a slow site, and probably more chances of the failure. I mean who loves a store which takes a couple of seconds to load? But with this package, they can definitely try out different ideas and see the actual results.

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Another that I would like to mention is that a cheaper plan doesn’t mean that they are going to put you in a shared environment. You are still going to have a separate instance with all the managed hosting features, high-end speed, and hardware to utilize. It’s just like any other WooCommerce Managed Hosting plan by Liquid Web but just customized for the beginners.

💰 Pricing

The price fall is definitely the biggest catch for this plan. But let’s take a look at what comes with this price and how it’s going to be helpful for all the starters out there. There are definitely slightly less amount of features in this plan to bring it to this price. But those are the features which a beginner might not even need.

With beginner plan, you get all the features like Database Optimization for WooCommerce, Jilt, Beaver Builder, Astra — the fastest WooCommerce theme, iTheme Sales Accelerator, and a Free SSL certificate.

However, you don’t get Glew.io integration which provides a detailed segmentation of user interests and how they’re shopping at your store. But yeah, that’s something big store owners might look for pushing in items in their stores based on demand and interests. So, makes sense. 👍

There are some other restrictions as well like you get to track and send emails to only 50 users for the cart abandonment. There’s also a restriction on the number of orders or number of products which you can add in the store. So, you can either have unlimited products but limited orders i.e 150/month. On the other hand, you can have unlimited orders with a total of 15 products.

Which kinda make sense to me, I mean 150 orders/month is a good number for a person starting out. If you see your store hitting the limit and growing you can definitely switch to another package. Another scenario could be, you just want to sell a limited number of products initially, in this case, you can go for unlimited orders. In both cases, beginners plan worths it for $39 bucks/month! 💯

🍒 Features

If you are already familiar with the regular plans of Liquid Web‘s Managed WooCommerce Hosting, then you will realize there are not a lot of new features to this plan. In fact, this plan is kind of a subset to the existing ones. But let’s take a quick look at those features and see how they can be helpful for the beginners.

🤖 Jilt Integration

When it comes to an online store, there’s a lot to consider than just simply putting up your products online. You have to consider your strategies for getting users on board, providing them with a great customer experience, recover customers, track behaviors, and stay in touch with them. Believe me, it’s a big relief to have experts like people at Liquid Web to take care of all the stuff for you.

They have curated a set of best tools to help you get started in the right way. And Jilt is one of the incredible tools you can take advantage of. It helps you recover the abandoned carts. According to a research study, about 70% of the buyers abandon their shopping carts, recovering those buyers can be a huge revenue bump.

👉 Jilt helps you plan email campaign to recover the customers. What it does is, it sends emails after different intervals to remind the customers if they are still interested in buying the product. The best thing about Jilt is, it comes with different pre-defined templates, which are super easy to customize and get started.

But remember there’s a limit on the number of users you can engage with Jilt in this plan i.e 50. Which is not a bad number for the starters. If you can engage even 50 users at the start and get them back to your store, then you are on your way to grow. 🔥

⚡️ Dashboard

Liquid Web still rocks a user-friendly, clean, and robust dashboard. It takes care of all the technical details and provides you a one-click functionality to get the things done. You get still get all features like SSL Certificate, Staging, VarnishCache, SSH/SFTPCredentials, Stencils, Logs, Backups, and VisualComparison at just a couple of clicks.

I won’t go deep into the details of all the features, but will definitely take a look at the new changes in the dashboard since the last time we reviewed it. Let’s get to them one by one.

📃 Restructured Logs: There used to be two kinds of logs in the Liquid Web dashboard — Access Logs and Error Logs. But now they have divided the error logs further into two types — PHP Errors Logs and Ngnix Error Logs. Which actually great, you have two distinct sections for two different type of errors. 💯

🎩 Cache Purging: Liquid Webcaches certain pages of your site for speed improvement. But sometimes it can cause little issues, especially when you’re making changes and they’re not appearing. It’s probably because you’re getting the cached files. By purging the cache, you can quickly see the changes you’re making. 👍

🤞 Object Cache: Another new thing which I have noticed is the Object Cache. Again, it helps you to boost your website speed. Unlike simple cache which cache pages, script, and styles, it caches the repeated queries results. Which help reduce the query response time.

🚀 iThemes Security & Sales Accelerator

Earlier this year, Liquid Web made a big move and acquired iThemes. During this year they have worked to integrate the iTheme products into there plans to provide the best value to the users. Now, even in the Managed WooCommerce plans, apart from other plugins, you have iTheme Security Pro and iThemes Sales Accelerator installed by default.

iThemes Sales Accelerator, you get a variety of useful features to boost your sales. You have an Advance Reporting feature, Inventory Management, Marketing Automation, Abandoned Carts, and Email Templates. The advance Reporting feature is available by default while the rest of them are either available with pro version or coming soon. Which probably indicates that they are currently working on this integration to make it better.

While in the iTheme Security plugin, you have tons of security modules to make your site secure. It generates an Activity Log, allows you to manage SSL Certificate, Banned Users, FilePermissions, DatabaseBackups, and protect from BruteForce. Also, it blocks hosts for multiple failed login attempts and you can see all the details in under the Security tab. ⚡️

🔥 Performance Test

I love to perform the speed test of the sites out of the box. It gives a fair amount of idea of what you can achieve after the optimization and how it’s gonna perform when you put all the load. So, I took my sample site on Liquid Web for a test to see how it goes.

I am on the beginner plan and the site is still on a subdomain of Liquid Web. Also, I have not set up anything at all. I performed the speed test multiple times and I got an average of ~500ms — not bad at all. It’s faster than 95% of the tested sites.

When I took a look at the requests and different factors leading to this result I found a few things. One of them was Minimize DNS Lookupswhich definitely not going to be a problem once you set up your custom domain. Also, it reports minor issues like removing query strings and Combining CSS/JS.

There’s clearly a big room for improvement. You can clearly get a performance bump by just tweaking things a little bit. So, definitely thumbs up! 👍

🦄 Support

Another thing which I would like to highlight about Liquid Web is their support. They literally rock one of the finest support team. You can reach them out on the live chat, drop an email, or even call them directly to get support. Which is quite great! 🤞

I recently had an issue with resetting the password and I reached them out around 1 AM. They got back to me immediately and helped figure out the things. I mean what else you can wish for?

You’re not solely dependent on the support to get the things done. They also have a solid documentation to help you with the things. In short, you will never feel stuck or abandoned while you’re on Liquid Web.

🙌 Wrap Up

I liked the idea of Managed WooCommerce Hosting since its launch. It had the potential to grow and be the next big thing in the WordPress economy. And it’s incredible to see how the team at Liquid Web has led this new product by constantly improving and introducing new features. Here they are now, with an exciting new plan to serve an even bigger audience. 💯

👉 Last time while writing about the launch of Managed WooCommerce Hosting, I experienced the lack of the availability of WooCommerce experts on support. Which is definitely not the case anymore. I am definitely looking forward to how Managed WooCommerce Hosting shapes up in the coming year. 🤞

So, if you’re a store owner struggling with your current host or just starting out you should definitely give Managed WooCommerce Hosting a try. It takescare of all the technical details and allows you to focus on your store & grow. Also, given the number of features, pre-installed plugins, and premium support it worths every single penny. And $39 is way affordable to get started with!

Do you own a store? If yes, which hosting do you rely on and have you tried WooCommerce Managed Hosting? Let us know your thoughts and experience in the comments below.

Maedah Batool is a WordPress Core Contributor, Technical Dev Manager and a part-time Journalist. She created a tech-training startup called FinkTanks where she has taught 1,000+ girls how to code with WordPress.